SCIENCE BRIEFING
Times Staff and Wire Reports
New dating techniques suggest that the remains of so-called Peking Man -- a batch of Homo erectus fossils found in the 1920s -- are 200,000 years older than previously calculated.
That suggests he was probably the oldest cold-weather inhabitant in human ancestry, according to the research in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature. During a glacial period about 770,000 years ago, the average yearly temperature in northern China, where he was found, would have hovered around the freezing mark.
